


The Final Act

by MagmaticKobaian



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist (Anime 2003)
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Flashbacks, Gen, Post-Fullmetal Alchemist (2003), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Swearing, ed: healthy coping mechanism? never heard of her, pre-CoS
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-14
Updated: 2020-08-14
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:07:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25895647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MagmaticKobaian/pseuds/MagmaticKobaian
Summary: It was only after being brought back from the dead that Edward truly understood the horror of human transmutation. A bout of insomnia, a stormy night, and a long train ride to Transylvania gave him plenty of time to reflect on that.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 18





	The Final Act

**Author's Note:**

> I am running on approximately zero hours of sleep because I don't make good life decisions. However, at least it satisfied my brain, which is always most active at four AM for some reason! This is a short-and-bittersweet one shot where Ed starts to unpack some of the horrible things that happened to him at the end of 2003. I really like 2003 Ed and his character, and I hope I managed to capture some of why I find him so interesting here.  
> Shout-outs to SiryyGray and their fic Capra for finally giving me the courage to write and post my 2003-centric ideas!

The weather outside the train car was almost as miserable as him.

A torrent of droplets lashed at the glass in an unending stream, painting its surface with water. It flowed down continuously, hiding his view of the outside world with a distorted, transparent veil. Not that he would have been able to see anything, regardless. On a moving train passing through uninhabited wilderness in the dead of night, ideal conditions provided a view of approximately jack and shit. He could pretend to glean some enjoyment out of seeing the vague, jagged outline of the towering evergreens of the forest they were skirting around the edges of, but that had gotten stale at around the two hour mark of insomnia.

The murmured groan of displeasure that escaped his lips carried through the car, empty save for him and two others. There wasn’t much interest in travel to Transylvania these days, especially with everything on the verge of war, and Ed had been silently wondering to himself what their reasons for making the trip were. Not that he would try actually  _ talking  _ to them, of course. If he had to hear one more fucking Dracula joke he was going to rip his ears out, and from the way none of the other passengers had tried to make small talk with each other, he assumed he wasn’t the only one.

The lights in the car had gone dim hours ago, depriving him of his ability to read to pass the time. Not that he had been making very good progress on his books, anyway: His clumsy prosthetics were a pale imitation of his automail. His father had done the best to imitate the design, but it was destined to always be just a bit worse. It was like playing a game of telephone with his own limbs.

He leaned against the window, and felt his cheek pressed against the glass. The bitter chill of the outside air seeped through, creating a light burning sensation on his flesh. With the rain and temperature outside, it was a good thing he wasn’t on the wrong side of the wall. Anyone out in these conditions, so far from human civilization, would probably end up dead.

Like he had been. Twice.

An especially large splatter of rain slammed the window with a sharp bang, violently dragging him into a spiral of memories.

His fist cried out, begging to be smashed into Envy’s face, but he  _ couldn’t _ . Everything in him was frozen, unstable and uncertain. His brain scrambled and reeled, trying to reorient, but recollapsing when it remembered the reason it had become off-kilter in the first place. He was on an emotional rollercoaster, and the car had just been sent flying off the track. There was no way in hell that he could accept that Envy was — or had been —  _ his brother _ . 

Envy’s lips moved, mouthing words he wasn’t in the state of mind to comprehend, and then he suddenly had a much bigger problem to worry about.

In a flash of total and incomprehensible pain, there was a numbing coldness straight through the center of his chest, where his heart was. Had been. He was dimly aware of Envy reaching toward his chest, but the perspective was all wrong. It would have to be reaching all the way through him, wouldn’t it?

Something had pinned him, in more ways than one. There was the aching chasm in his heart, roughly filled, but also a shocked paralysis that stuck needles through every nerve in his body. His jaw hung open, frozen midway through a gasp that never fully arrived. The whole world felt like it stilled with him, a handful of eyes all focused intently on him. The silence was deafening.

The false tranquility was ruptured by the violent lurching of his stomach. His throat contracted, and the slimy sensation of blood coated his esophagus. It splattered as it hit the floor, splashing back onto his uselessly dangling legs. It was a sharp smacking sound, like rain on a window.

Lightning struck somewhere in the forest, harshly illuminating the innards of the train car for a fraction of a second until the returning darkness plunged him back into the past.

His head drifted to the side, primarily assisted by gravity. His thinning mental functions were solely dedicated to protecting his brother. Envy’s arm was roughly pulled from his chest, and he tumbled to the floor, spread eagle, with his eyes gazing toward the ceiling.

The last coherent thought that drifted through his head was of his own death. Darkness crept at the edges of his peripheral vision, shrinking the world before him down to a single point of light. Everything in his head was shutting down, like a circuit breaker having all of its switches flipped. His mind weakly clawed for a point of reference, anything to make it bearable, but there was none. Death was total, final, and absolute, completely incomparable to anything. The last light went out. The curtain closed. He was dead.

Until he wasn’t.

It made sense why he couldn’t remember anything between dying and coming back to life. After all, the dead didn’t have memories. He could sometimes pretend it was just like going to sleep and waking up, but deep down, he could feel something was fundamentally wrong. His recollection of his behavior right after he had come back felt wrong, like he had temporarily become a different person. At the time, he had calmly sent Rose away before committing an act that would have likely led to his death with a beatific grace. Even though it had been to save his brother, the idea that he would have so easily thrown his life away horrified him, as incomprehensible as death itself.

From what Ed had gleaned from his dad, he had been practically vegetative the week afterwards, alternating between a comatose state and random, violent outbursts, confined to his bed. He was inconsolable, barely human.

His father had told him about how every time he had switched bodies, a small part of his soul had been lost, left in the original or seeped away by alchemical processes. A tiny voice at the back of Ed’s mind told him the same would be true of him eventually, given the ways he had managed to cheat death. 

Another flash of lightning cleaved through the forest, a white streak smudged at the edges by the water smearing the window. He remembered how lightning could reach temperatures hotter than the surface of the sun, which was balanced out by the impossibly short time frames they occupied. If his second death was defined by the cold, then his first was certainly defined by heat.

He liked to think it hadn’t affected him as much, rationalizing it away with the fact that he hadn’t been in  _ his _ body, after all, that he knew it was a temporary death, that it had been quicker, but the part of him that had become unnaturally wise through years of trauma knew better. The absurdity of it all had refused to sink in. One minute, he was walking down the road. The next, he was trapped under the melting steel carcass of a war machine, burning alive in the rubble. 

A sickly shiver raced down his spine. Thinking about the other Edward tended to do that to him. To put it frankly, he was an imposter, pretending to live someone else’s life. If not for him, the other Ed would likely still be alive, or at least gotten to live a bit longer. Like father, like son. 

He was going to throw up if he didn’t pull back from this train of thought, but his sleep-deprived brain pressed forward, unfettered by exhaustion and fatigue. Naturally, it dove straight into thoughts of his mother.

Before, thinking about his mother led him back to happy memories, those photographic moments etched into his mind by strong sunlight and gentle smiles, the last time they had been whole. Now, all he could think of was the very moment of her death.

He wondered if she, too, had been free of pain in those very final moments, sinking into the void as she passed away. Their causes of death had been distinctly different, of course: A wasting illness versus traumatic impalement. In the end, though, there was something morbidly similar about how they had ended up there. They had tried to shoulder a burden for the only family they had left, and stubbornness had been their downfall.

What would she have done if the transmutation had been successful? Would she have been like him, totally disconnected from reality, unable to deal with anything? He doubted the younger him could have handled such an outcome, deeming it a failure. Maybe it would have been worse. Maybe, after being beyond the veil of death for so long, she would have emerged a completely different person, devoid of a soul. A homunculus.

Ed shook his head and squeezed his eyes shut, burying his face in his hands. Steadily, he tried to stabilize his breathing, which had become unnaturally quick and shallow. He had no idea how long he was there, teetering on the edge of a panic attack, but eventually, he managed to find an equilibrium. The contents of his stomach were safe, for now.

He refused to follow this train of thought any longer, no matter how true it was. That part of his life was already in his rear-view mirror, and if he tried to unpack all of his many,  _ many  _ traumas before moving on, he would be sixty before he could even think about trying to return home. For now, he had to keep moving forward. His mental health could wait until after he got home.

A warped, thin sliver of dawn played through the window. Silently, he watched the sunrise through a watery filter, cursing the rain for distorting his view. He ignored the wet trails leading down his face, or the fact that it had stopped raining hours ago.


End file.
